Universal triangular spectra in parametrically-driven systems

Abstract

We analyse triangular spectra that appear in many branches of physics that deal with parametrically-driven systems, and give a simple theoretical analysis for them in terms of the nonlinear dynamics of multimode fields. Such spectra appear universally as a result of an exponential decay of the nonlinearly generated frequency modes of many parametrically-driven systems, and have been confirmed by recent observations of noise-driven supercontinuum generation in optical fibers. We demonstrate that such universal triangular spectra (UTS) can be well-described by the analytical expressions for the spectra of Akhmediev breather (AB) solutions at the point of maximal compression.